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W HAT IS ordinarily done in prefaces I have tried to do in my first two chapters, which explain the origin and the intent of this book, as well as its central terms. But one thing should be particularly clear at the beginning: what I have done is merely to use the idea of anti-intellectualism as a device for looking at various aspects, hardly the most appealing, of American society and culture. Despite the fringes of documentation on many of its pages, this work is by no means a formal history but largely a personal book, whose factual details are organized and dominated by my views. The theme itself has been developed in a manner that is by choice rather impulsive and by necessity only fragmentary.
If one is to look at a society like ours from its nether end, so to speak, through scores of consecutive pages, one must resolve to risk wounding the national amour-propre , although this can only divert attention from the business at hand, which is to shed a little light on our cultural problems. One must resolve still more firmly to run some slight risk of encouraging the canting and self-righteous anti-Americanism that in Europe today so commonly masquerades as well-informed criticism of this country. For all their bragging and their hypersensitivity, Americans are, if not the most self-critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other—their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose. This very uncertainty has given their intellectuals a critical function of special interest. The appropriation of some of this self-criticism by foreign ideologues for purposes that go beyond its original scope or intention is an inevitable hazard. But the possibility that a sound enterprise in self-correction may be overheard and misused is the poorest of reasons for suspending it. On this count I admire the spirit of Emerson, who wrote: “Let us honestly state the facts. Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.”
R. H.